In the December 2015 survey we received responses from 901,002,770 sites and 5,579,077 web-facing computers, reflecting a loss of 2.0 million sites, but a gain of 39,900 computers.
Apache suffered the largest loss of 13.4 million sites, followed by Microsoft, which lost 5.0 million. A good part of this month's overall losses were caused by expired .xyz domains, which resulted in nearly 9 million .xyz websites disappearing from the internet. Despite the widespread losses caused by the demise of these websites, nginx managed to gain 7.1 million sites overall, which was the largest growth seen by any web server vendor.
The .xyz top-level domain was made available to the general public on 2 June 2014 and immediately received strong support from Network Solutions, which registered nearly 100,000 .xyz domains during the first ten days of operation. Controversially, Network Solutions gave away many .xyz domains for free to customers who already had the corresponding domain under the .com TLD. This was done on an opt-out basis, and the domains were only free for the first year, leaving some customers surprised when each domain became due for renewal at a cost of $38 this year.
Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc, is one of the most notable users of the .xyz TLD with the domain abc.xyz, while some of the other popular .xyz sites include adult sites and torrent search engines. The .xyz TLD has also proven reasonably popular with fraudsters: Netcraft found phishing sites on 150 .xyz domains throughout November 2015.
This month's changes have caused Apache's leading market share to fall by 1.41 points to 35.6%, while nginx's site share has increased to 17.4%. A little over a year ago, Microsoft was in the lead, but has recently been floating around in second place, currently 9.2 percentage points ahead of nginx, and 9.0 behind Apache.
As well as gaining the largest number of sites this month, nginx also showed the largest growth in terms of web-facing computers, growing by 17,000 to reach a total of 765,000. Despite their site losses, Apache and Microsoft also gained a reasonable number of web-facing computers (10,400 and 6,100), while Lighttpd and Google suffered small losses.
A relatively unknown web server, Safedog, was found serving nearly ten times as many websites as last month, making it now the 7th most commonly used web server software with 6.3 million hostnames. However, the number of web-facing computers with Safedog installed is very low – less than 300 – and nearly all of these are running the deprecated Windows Server 2003 operating system. All websites using this Chinese server software claim to be running Safedog 4.0.0, which appears to be a cloud security system.
2015 has been a turbulent year in terms of hostnames, with the total number of sites rising from 877 million in January, to 901 million in December, but dipping as low as 849 million in April. Apache has continued to lead the market throughout the year, with Microsoft following in second place, getting to within 4.1 percentage points of Apache's share in October. In web-facing computers, nginx has shown remarkably consistent growth in its market share, while both Apache and Microsoft have declined. nginx is now installed on 13.71% of all web-facing computers, compared with 11.03% at the start of the year, and its market share within the top million sites has also grown noticeably from 21.09% to 24.29%.
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
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Apache suffered the largest loss of 13.4 million sites, followed by Microsoft, which lost 5.0 million. A good part of this month's overall losses were caused by expired .xyz domains, which resulted in nearly 9 million .xyz websites disappearing from the internet. Despite the widespread losses caused by the demise of these websites, nginx managed to gain 7.1 million sites overall, which was the largest growth seen by any web server vendor.
The .xyz top-level domain was made available to the general public on 2 June 2014 and immediately received strong support from Network Solutions, which registered nearly 100,000 .xyz domains during the first ten days of operation. Controversially, Network Solutions gave away many .xyz domains for free to customers who already had the corresponding domain under the .com TLD. This was done on an opt-out basis, and the domains were only free for the first year, leaving some customers surprised when each domain became due for renewal at a cost of $38 this year.
Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc, is one of the most notable users of the .xyz TLD with the domain abc.xyz, while some of the other popular .xyz sites include adult sites and torrent search engines. The .xyz TLD has also proven reasonably popular with fraudsters: Netcraft found phishing sites on 150 .xyz domains throughout November 2015.
This month's changes have caused Apache's leading market share to fall by 1.41 points to 35.6%, while nginx's site share has increased to 17.4%. A little over a year ago, Microsoft was in the lead, but has recently been floating around in second place, currently 9.2 percentage points ahead of nginx, and 9.0 behind Apache.
As well as gaining the largest number of sites this month, nginx also showed the largest growth in terms of web-facing computers, growing by 17,000 to reach a total of 765,000. Despite their site losses, Apache and Microsoft also gained a reasonable number of web-facing computers (10,400 and 6,100), while Lighttpd and Google suffered small losses.
A relatively unknown web server, Safedog, was found serving nearly ten times as many websites as last month, making it now the 7th most commonly used web server software with 6.3 million hostnames. However, the number of web-facing computers with Safedog installed is very low – less than 300 – and nearly all of these are running the deprecated Windows Server 2003 operating system. All websites using this Chinese server software claim to be running Safedog 4.0.0, which appears to be a cloud security system.
2015 has been a turbulent year in terms of hostnames, with the total number of sites rising from 877 million in January, to 901 million in December, but dipping as low as 849 million in April. Apache has continued to lead the market throughout the year, with Microsoft following in second place, getting to within 4.1 percentage points of Apache's share in October. In web-facing computers, nginx has shown remarkably consistent growth in its market share, while both Apache and Microsoft have declined. nginx is now installed on 13.71% of all web-facing computers, compared with 11.03% at the start of the year, and its market share within the top million sites has also grown noticeably from 21.09% to 24.29%.
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
Apache
334,095,10237.00%320,676,75935.59%-1.41Microsoft
244,906,58627.12%239,927,01326.63%-0.49nginx
149,967,73316.61%157,001,01817.43%0.82Google
19,622,6242.17%20,362,6782.26%0.09
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
Apache
86,528,26449.99%86,135,30250.14%0.14nginx
27,855,45516.09%27,480,55016.00%-0.10Microsoft
17,289,8559.99%17,887,53210.41%0.42Google
13,182,5017.62%13,196,5057.68%0.06For more information see Active Sites
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
Apache
467,66446.77%463,64346.36%-0.40nginx
239,35823.94%242,85224.29%0.35Microsoft
115,84211.58%115,82511.58%-0.00Google
22,1872.22%22,0722.21%-0.01
DeveloperNovember 2015PercentDecember 2015PercentChange
Apache
2,549,98446.04%2,560,40745.89%-0.14Microsoft
1,575,55928.44%1,581,61328.35%-0.10nginx
747,99813.50%764,99213.71%0.21Continue reading...